Category: NPO in the media

As a mother and grandmother, I’ve witnessed first-hand the struggles wonderful fathers face while fighting for time with their children in the Michigan family court system. The cards are stacked against them.

Time and time again, fathers lose custody battles because the courts say one parent, most times the mother, is better for the children. Why is losing one parent even a consideration? When children have two fit, willing, and able parents, why not keep both? Just because the parents separate, why are the children forced to lose one of them? It’s 2017, not 1917 — gender roles are a thing of the past. If mothers want to be the primary breadwinners, they can be. If fathers want to be stay-at-home dads — more power to them.

Luckily, Michigan legislators are working on a solution for our state’s children. Before the Legislature paused for summer break, the House of Representatives’ Judiciary Committee passed HB 4691, which is sponsored by Rep. Jim Runestad. The bill places Michigan in line to follow in the footsteps of states including Kentucky and Missouri, which have recently passed laws supportive of shared parenting — a flexible arrangement where children spend as close to equal time with each parent as possible after divorce or separation.

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A new law grants the wishes of many Kentucky children by bringing them what they need most following divorce: both parents.

Effective this month, the state has a new law on temporary child custody orders, which are the starting point for separating families. Kentucky’s House and Senate unanimously approved the changes to Kentucky Statute 403.280 making joint custody and equal parenting time the presumption in temporary child custody hearings during divorce processes. Simply put, custody conversations will begin with the two-parent model.

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Not all holidays are created to sell greeting cards and flowers. Many are started to bring attention to something that our society needs to address. Parental Alienation Awareness Day, which hits in the spring, was designed to do just that – make more people aware of how children are harmed when they are alienated from one parent and how to prevent our family courts from becoming unwitting perpetrators of this offense. As the year charges on, we must continue to address this unfortunate reality.

Parent alienation – characterized by behaviors that intentionally damage the relationship a parent has with a child – is an increasingly common form of abuse. It can affect intact families but is much more common among children affected by separation or divorce. To decrease the rates of parental alienation affecting our children, it is time Virginia updates its laws to support shared parenting.

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National Parents Organization”/seasoned reporter Robert Franklin said that CPS was being defiant against Senator Rick Murphy‘s, and that CPS did not have genuine concerns about his parenting skills.

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“Children are now more likely to see both parents regularly after a divorce, which is a huge win for the children of Kentucky, considering research consistently shows shared parenting is in the best interest of children when their parents divorce,” Hale said.

“Plus, parents are no longer in the high-conflict winner-win-all and loser-lose-all situation.”

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“Children are now more likely to see both parents regularly after a divorce, which is a huge win for the children of Kentucky, considering research consistently shows shared parenting is in the best interest of children when their parents divorce,” Hale said. “Plus, parents are no longer in the high-conflict winner win all and loser lose all situation.”

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According to Ned Holstein of the National Parents Organization shared parenting should be implemented as a rebuttable presumption in a manner that creates incentives for parents to cooperate in raising a child.

He believes that, “Mental health professionals can play a very positive and satisfying role in this transition. They should already be counseling their patients in troubled relationships that their children will more likely do better with shared parenting, as hard as that may be for the parent to accept given the anger and hurt during separation and divorce. Professional efforts currently devoted to identifying a sole custodial parent on the basis of small differences in parental abilities may instead be used to help parents navigate cooperative parenting or parallel parenting. It will be far more satisfying to help families make the adjustments that result in more harmonious post-nuclear-family relationships, and to see happy children as a result, than to assist the court in picking winners and losers. Any shared parenting legislation should provide for the financing of post-court family counseling services, which in one way or another can replace the funds currently used for custody evaluations.”

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Charitable bodies such as the National Parents Organization have criticized family law, noting that it is not configured to ensure that boys (and girls) spend the necessary time with their fathers. These advocates have lobbied for serious family law reform, mainly for a model known as ‘shared parenting’, which would mean children spend 50/50 time with each parent.  However, shared parenting remains uncommon in North America, even though research shows that this is beneficial for the children concerned.

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Linda Wright, of the National Parent’s Organization in Michigan, earlier this month said she saw the ill effects of a single parent family when her husband died in 1998.

“While we can’t protect our children from the loss of a parent resulting from death, we certainly have the ability and responsibility to do everything possible to prevent the loss of a parent that occurs through divorce,” she said. “The children are innocent victims here.”

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I’d like to recognize the millions of fathers who are fighting for shared parenting – the right to continue to be active and loving dads after separating or divorce. It is not just about your “rights,” although there is no reason a good father should not have the same rights as a good mother. It is also about what is best for your children, since over 50 research studies from numerous countries show that children with shared parenting on average have much better lives than the millions of children in the sole custody of one parent.

U.S. Census data shows our family courts still favor sole custody to mom more than 80 percent of the time, despite the similarity of gender roles in modern couples. So the battle for legal equality in family court feels like a frustrating and uphill battle. But dads, don’t give up. For the sake of one-third of our nation’s children (that’s how many kids are now affected by child custody issues), I encourage you to keep up this good fight – and here are five of the many reasons why.

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